Dreaming Your Stories into Being

Do mystical words like “white-hot center” and “yearning” and “trance” make you squirm in your chair, or light up from within?  From Where You Dream:  The Process of Writing Fiction is a collection of lectures Robert Olen Butler delivered while at Florida State University.  Janet Burroway, whose text on writing fiction is a cornerstone for workshops around the nation, edited the lectures from their original “extempore” delivery into what is a cohesive and fascinating look at how Robert Olen Butler believes writers should compose novels.

Let me say this from the beginning:  From Where You Dream is unlike any other book out there.  Yes, you’ll find advice on characters and plotting, but Butler’s emphasis is on process, and his primary concern is that most of us out there, including published novelists, are doing it wrong.  Some might quibble with what occasionally comes across as an overly-prescriptive approach, but we grow as writers when we reflect on our writing, and that includes the way we do it.  I am one of the least efficient writers on the planet, requiring many drafts and revisions before my work finds a unified form.  I read books like Robert Olen Butler’s because I am ever searching for a better way, and I am happy to report there is so much that is good and helpful in this book. As a writer who also teaches fiction at the college level, I know I will be referring to it during the semester. 

Robert Olen Butler begins by quoting Akira Kurosawa, who once said “To be an artist means never to avert your eyes.”  Here is the focus of his methods and his lectures:  high art.  “You must, to be in here, have the highest aspirations for yourselves as writers,” Butler says from the start, “—the desire to create works of fiction that will endure, that reflect and articulate the deepest truths about the human condition” (10).   If you believe this, you are going to love this book.  It’s true that some writers have simpler aims, to tell a good story, to create an imaginary realm where another reader might spend a few happy hours, and there’s nothing wrong with that.  “There are two of you,” Butler opines at one point, “one who wants to write and one who doesn’t.” Wherever we fall on such a continuum—high art or pulp fiction—how we confront the blank page and the scary secret thoughts of our unconscious is one of the most important questions we face.

“Art comes from the place where you dream,” (13) Butler tells us, while advising us to live and write as “sensualists” and not “intellectuals.”  Sensual.  Dream.  Ravenous.  These are not terms we ordinarily find in texts on writing and yet they lie at the core of writing and art.  The problem, according to Butler, “is that the artistic medium of fiction writers—language—is not innately sensual” (17).    We have to find a way to seek out the unconscious mind, a place brimming with livid energy, and describe this world in sensual terms.  “[F]or those two hours a day when you write you cannot flinch.  You have to go down into the deepest, darkest, most roiling, white-hot place…you have to go down there; down into the deepest part of it, and you can’t flinch, can’t walk away” (18).  Are you nervous yet?  The way we find this place is through the trance, the “flow state.” Robert Olen Butler wants you to find the zone.

His chapter on “yearning” is a must read for all fiction writers.  One of Butler’s primary concerns is that authors have set aside emotion, have forgotten that the “phenomenon of desire” should be at the center of every story.  “We are the yearning creatures of this planet” Butler says (40).  In a statement that also appears in Janet Burroway's seminal textbook Writing Fiction, he notes that “desire is the driving force behind plot.  The character yearns, the character does something in pursuit of that yearning, and some force or other will block the attempt to fulfill that yearning” (42).  Sound simple?  The trouble is all too often we forget what our characters want, muddy the water, create characters who are passive observers instead of active seekers.  Butler doesn’t think you should start writing until it’s absolutely clear what your character yearns for.

In this respect, Robert Olen Butler reminds me of another famous writer.  I like to quote Kurt Vonnegut to my students.  “Make your character want something right away” Vonnegut says, “even if it’s something as simple as a glass of water.  Characters paralyzed by the meaning of life still have to drink water from time to time.”  Vonnegut goes on to talk about a story one of this students wrote, about a nun who needs to remove a piece of dental floss from her teeth.  According to him, “the story was about deeper things than that, but no one who read the story could do so without fishing around in his or her mouth.”

The main advice in From Where You Dream is how to get access to that molten part of our unconscious minds.  Robert Olen Butler wants you to consider “dreamstorming, “ a process he describes like this:  “You’re going to sit or recline in your writing space in your trance and you’re going to free-float, free-associate, sit with your character, watch your character move around in the potential world of this novel” (87).    Butler wants you to do this day after day, before you ever start writing.  What emerges out of the dreamstorm should be a scattering of images, sensual moments, between six or ten words that indicate what is going to happen in this scene.  He advises doing this until you have filled two hundred or so three-by-five cards with potential scenes.  The goal of this dreamstorming is what “psychologists call functional fixedness.”  By seeking out a trance state day after day, your mind naturally responds, opening up doorways into the unconscious.  Once you have all the cards in place you organize them, searching for your opening scene.  The structure he says, grows “organically” from the process.  “When you are driven by the desire for the organic wholeness of the object, and by the need to recompose the elements that are already in the work, and by the dynamics of your character’s desire, structure will inevitably come from that” (94).

Do you buy into the process?  In a way it sounds like the advice I give my students for putting together a research essay, but with a strong mystical dose of meditation to tap into the right side of the brain.  I thought of Ray Bradbury (see my post from a few years ago) and his brainstorming lists from The Zen of Writing.  The primary thing I took from Where You Dream was the highly important emphasis of finding a way to enter that waking dream state, the trance mind, where all good writing originates.  I thought more deeply about my characters and what they want and how important it is to never lose sight of this.

I have an hour a day to write during the school year.  It’s all I can spare once the papers start rolling in.  Even if I don’t go all the way into using Butler’s three-by-five cards, I know from reading this book that I need to spend more time clearing my conscious mind, meditating, and the result will deepen my fiction.

There’s much more From Where You Dream than I have space for here.  The chapter on “The Cinema of the Mind” makes reading it worth your time and money alone.  For writers there’s an abundance of good advice about the process of shaping a novel and stories.  For the teacher of writing, there are great examples (and a neat activity using anecdotes that I’d like to try) about the writing workshop, including an appendix with an older short story of Robert Olen Butler’s, “Open Arms,” and student examples that incorporate analysis.

If you love writing, if you want to learn and grow, buy this book.  It’s one of the best books on writing that I’ve read in a long time.



Does Exercise Matter for the Working Writer?

I expected to love Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, since it features two of my favorites subjects, jogging and the craft of writing.  Throw in a dash of memoir and you have what should have been an inspirational read.  I hoped the book would jumpstart my exercise program and fuel my progress through the final revision of my second novel.

To those ends, the book disappoints, but I was still glad I read it. Maybe I was expecting too much from one of the world’s premier authors, but this thin memoir doesn’t measure up to classics like Stephen King’s On Writing or Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. If you don’t already love running or writing, Murakami’s memoir won’t do much for you.

Why?  Let’s get the bad out of the way first and then discuss what the book does right.  Murakami’s descriptions of running feature some of the most flaccid prose I’ve encountered this year.  He even resorts to cliché, complaining of it “raining cats and dogs” during a training session for the New York Marathon.  Consider this passage about his run between Marathon, Greece and Athens: 

The road within the Athen’s city limit is very hard to run on.  It’s about three miles from the stadium to the highway and entrance and there are lots of stoplights, which messes up my pace.  There are also a lot of places where construction and double-parked cars block the road, and I have to step out in the middle of the street.  What with cars zooming around early in the morning, running here can be dangerous.  (Murakami 61)

Note the painful passive tense, the lack of sensory imagery.  Much of this book contains exactly these kinds of snooze-inducing descriptions of running.  The memoir portions from a man characterized as a “guardedly private writer” probably won’t surprise longtime Murakami fans.  We learn he once owned a jazz club and was a former smoker.  He collects LP’s and has a special fondness for classic rock and roll.  There’s little insight into the man’s psychology, the unique forces and life events that shape a great writer.  And maybe this is a good thing.  Murakami comes across as slightly dull in his memoir. There’s no messed up childhood, no triumph over alcohol or drugs.  This is a record of one writer getting it done.  He leaves the magic for his stories.

There are surprises in this book.  Murakami discusses artists who hit their peak as they approached middle age, like Dostoevesky, who produced his greatest novel, The Brothers Karamazov, shortly before his death. The book becomes most dynamic and hits some soaring notes when it makes the connections between running and writing.  Noting that both are a matter of talent, Murakami, who doesn’t consider himself talented at either, believes that:

I have to pound the rock with a chisel and dig out of a deep hole before I can locate the source of creativity.  To write a novel I have to drive myself hard physically and use a lot of time and effort.   Every time I begin a new novel, I have dredge out another deep hole.  (Murkami 43)

Many of us have seen runners crippled by aching joints and bad knees in old age. What Murakami points out in this book is that writing offers similar highs and joys, but also takes a toll that is both psychic and physical.  Art always involves sacrifice. In another passage, he makes his thoughts on discipline and concentration abundantly clear:

Writing novels, to me, is basically a kind of manual labor.  Writing itself is mental labor, but finishing an entire book is closer to manual labor.  It doesn’t involve heavy lifting, running fast, or leaping high.  Most people only see the surface of writing and think of writers as involved in quiet, intellectual work done in their study.  If you have the strength to lift a coffee cup, they figure, you can write a novel. But once you try your hand at it, you soon find it isn’t as peaceful a job as it seems.  The whole process--sitting at your desk, focusing your mind like a laser beam, imagining something out of a blank horizon, creating a story, selecting the right words, one by one, keeping the whole flow of the story on track—requires far more energy than most people ever imagine.  You might not move your body around, but there’s grueling dynamic labor going on inside you.  Everybody uses their mind when they think.  But a writer puts on an outfit called narrative and thinks with his entire being; and for the novelist that process requires putting into play all your physical reserve, often to the point of overexertion.   (Murakami 79-80)

When my teaching schedule or home life gets hectic, the first thing I let go is the exercise.  The hour a five mile jog—or plod, in my case—is an easy cut.  As the papers pile up, or the children get sick, I cling to what little time I have.  I keep writing, trying to carve out a little space in the day.  What I gained from this book most clearly is a realization of how important my physical health is to the writing that I need to do.  If I want to write, I need to run, or like Charles Dickens, take up an evening walk which will allow me to think about the stories I’m working on.   I’ll leave with Murakami’s thoughts on these things:

In any event, I’m happy I haven’t stopped running all these years.  The reason is, I like the novels I’ve written.  And I’m really looking forward to seeing what kind of novel I’ll produce next.  Since I’m a writer with limits—an imperfect person living an imperfect, limited life—the fact that I can still feel this way is a real accomplishment.  Calling it a miracle, might be an exaggeration, but I really do feel this way.  And if running every day helps me accomplish this, then I’m very grateful to running.  (Murakami 82)

For the Murakami fan in your family this book is well worth a purchase.  For the runner with literary ambitions, it offers some heady delights.  It’s by no means a perfect little memoir, but this is a book on writing worth your time and effort.

Robert Boswell's The Half Known World is a great read for anyone interested in writing "literary" fiction and the first two chapters are a great read for anyone period. Chapter one is the book's cornerstone. Here Boswell inveighs against creative writing classes that have students making character lists, about birthdays, jobs, etc. This reminds me very much of Flannery O'Connor who insisted on the "mystery of personality" as the core of good stories. Anything that kills mystery for readers and writers is bad practice. Boswell describes wandering an unknown, forbidden territory as a boy, a destination he and his friend never successfully reach. To really write well and make evocative characters "the writer must suggest a dimension to fictional reality that escapes comprehension. The writer wishes to make his characters and their world known to the reader, and he simultaneously wishes to make them resonate with the unknown." It's this territory of the unknown, the mysterious, that is our true aim. I loved every moment of this first chapter.

Likewise, the second chapter captivated me. By telling a story of an encounter with a troubled woman at the bar, Robert Boswell describes his writing practice. I heard him read this aloud at the AWP convention a few years ago and was enthralled. It's something I could share with my undergraduate students. I also really liked his chapter on the "Alternate Universe" and his thoughts on omniscience are likewise indispensable.

Other chapters were intriguing, but a little troubling for me. Boswell's repeated use of the term "literary" is meant to establish a hierarchy in the fictional world and to make his points he sometimes dismisses the work of popular authors like Barbara Kingsolver or Sue Miller. He speaks of his own loves, for baseball and film noir, as "soft spots" that he wouldn't be able to write about in his fiction. This feels like bad advice to me. I think our core material often grows out of our obsessions, what we love. However, these are small quibbles. This one of the best books I've read recently on writing, one that has me longing for the free time to get writing again this coming month when school lets out, to once more set out to explore that mysterious terrain, the woods and iced over streams leading down to that unreachable river beyond.

You can read more about Boswell, including links to his stories, here: http://www.robertboswell.com/_center_the_half_known_world__center__69674.htm

Worth the Price of Admission

Now Write! Fiction Writing Exercises from Today's Best Writing Teachers, edited by Sherry Ellis, is a useful addition to the bookshelf for writers, especially those who also teach creative writing. I immediately started using some of the exercises in my fiction class.

I had a moment where I laughed out loud. Amidst the usual exercises on character and point of view there was this advice from Kathleen Spivak in her "The Writing Exercise: A Recipe."

Ingredients and Preparation

Before bedtime, pick up the alarm clock. Set it to ring two hours earlier than your usual wake-up time.

Sleep. Or don't. But get up anyway.

Put a mug of coffee, tea, or other comfort in your hands. Now go to your desk immediately. Sit down. Look dazed. Open the computer-mind.

Work on a writing project--somehow for two hours. Don't complain. (Spivak 64).

Spivak goes on to describe doing for this a year, comparing the writing project to a "dominatrix" and a "virus that takes hold." I loved it. Here is the writing process boiled down to its stark essence. Art will always require sacrifice, as she makes clear. If you want to write you must be willing to give up sleep, set aside distractions, and carve a space for yourself seperate from the world. As Rilke once said, "Ask yourself in the stillest hour, must I write?"

I loved it, but this is very difficult for me to do now right now. I'm in the midst of a new semester. I have two lovely young daughters, age four and one, to help raise. I'm content with my life and why would I spoil such contentment to work morning after morning on something that may never see the light of day?

Art. I know I'll be returning to the novel soon. In the stillest hour I will write!

There are many other worthy chapters in this essay collection. For teachers of writing, chapters like Crystal Wilkinson's "Birth of a Story in an Hour or Less" make Now Write! well worth the price of admission.

Book Lovers Night at the College of Saint Benedict's!

I am very excited about this upcoming event. I'm heading to the College of Saint Benedict's as part of the summer reading program next week. I look forward to the evening and conversation!

SB “Book Lovers' Night" features author Thomas Maltman

07/27/2009

Thomas Maltman, author of The Night Birds, is the featured guest at the College of Saint Benedict’s “Book Lovers' Night” Wednesday, Aug. 5 at Teresa Reception Center, Main Building, CSB.

The book program begins at 6:45 p.m., and is free to the public. An optional “light” dinner will be offered at 6 p.m. for $7.

The Night Birds is Maltman’s first novel and was released in 2007 by Soho Press. Set in 1876 in Minnesota, the book spotlights 14-year-old Asa Senger and his German immigrant family. It is a time of uncertainty for the family, as vast clouds of locust descend on the Great Plains. The James-Younger gang, a band of murderous thieves, is rumored to be riding north of the area.

During this time of uncertainty for Asa and his family, his Aunt Hazel arrives on the scene. Confined for years in an asylum, she brings with her stories of the Dakota War (also known as the Dakota Conflict) of 1862. Her arrival propels the story into the past, as far back as the Senger family’s initial settlement in slave-holding Missouri.

The Night Birds has received the Alex Award from the American Library Association, the Friends of American Writers Literary Award and the Spur Award from the Western Writers of America.

"We all set our sights on the Great American Novel. . . . (Maltman) comes impressively close to laying his hands on the grail," wrote reviewer Madison Smartt Bell in The Boston Globe newspaper.

Maltman’s essays, poetry and fiction have been published in the Georgetown Review, Great River Reviewand Main Channel Voices, among other journals. Maltman, who lives in Minneapolis, is expected to release a second novel, Little Wolves, soon.

The Night Birds will be on sale at 20 percent off at both the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University bookstores through the event. For more information on the event, please call 320-363-2119, or e-mail bookevents@csbsju.edu.

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Diane Hageman Director of Media Relations College of Saint Benedict Phone 320-363-5748 Fax 320-363-5136 dhageman@csbsju.edu

Burn Calories - wikiHow

Okay. This blog is supposed about aspects of creative writing, but I had to post this. My Google page includes many odd links including a daily Wiki-How, a "how-to" of the day. The subjects are unfailing esoteric and interesting, everything from how to tell a good horror story, to how to look good naked. The following post is creative, even if it's not about writing so much. It includes odd ways to lose weight, from fidgeting to linking your work station to a treadmill. (Could you treadmill while writing a novel? The idea intrigues me. ) So it's not about writing, but after a long winter of dark beer and heavy foods, I am still looking for ways to lose weight this summer. Here's some tips, courtesy of Wiki-How.

Burn Calories - wikiHow

Rules for Writing a Novel?

As I work on this final draft on Little Wolves over the summer, I'm constantly thinking about craft and principle. "There are three rules to writing a novel," W. Somerset Maugham once said, "but no-one can agree what they are." The truth is that you have to teach yourself how to write every novel. Writing one is no guarantee that you'll ever finish another. Many don't. One of those depressing statistics I've encountered is that 80% of all debut authors never go on to publish another work. That's frightening for those of us in the trenches, so when I get frightened I look for a helpful guide.

One of those guides that I've written about in my Goodreads account is Sol Stein's How to Grow a Novel. Stein is a former agent and author and provides an insider's view of the art. (He's also the author of Stein on Writing, and The Magician.) He places a writer's focus where it should be, on the reader. In the appendix section he offers some "principles" that I'd like to list here for those of you spending your summer writing. I'm a lover of lists and I find this one instructive. For copyright reasons this is just a partial sampling of the book. The list itself does not hint at the full riches the book offers. For that you'll need to buy yourself a copy!

Before Beginning to Write

1. What does your protagonist want badly?
2. Who or what is in your protagonist's way? ("Who" will be more dramatic)
3. Get into the skin of characters who are different from you.
4. Why would you want to spend time in the company of the person you are choosing as your protagonist?
5. How do your characters view each other? Write a short paragraph about each character's views of the virtues, faults, and follies of other important characters. Save these paragraphs for referral and guidance.
6. How are you planning to hook your reader on page one?
7. Consider starting a with a scene that is already underway.
8. What are the dramatic conflicts you intend to let the reader see in each chapter?

Keep in Mind While Writing

1. The "engine" of your story needs to be turned on as close to the beginning as possible. The "engine" is the point at which a story involves a reader, the place at which the reader can't stop reading.
2. Keep the action visible on stage as much as you can.
3. Don't mark time; move the story relentlessly
4. Is your hero or heroine actively doing something rather than being done to?
5. Use surprise (such as an unexpected obstacle) to create suspense.
6. During your descriptions of places do you also move the story along?
7. End scenes and chapters with thrusters that make the reader curious about what happens next.
8. To increase a reader's interest, deprive him of something he wants to know.

There are many items on this list (25 in all!) and I recommend you buy the book which includes many instructive examples highlighting why each point is so crucial. Copyright:

Stein, Sol. How To Grow a Novel: The Most Common Mistakes Writers Make and How to Avoid Them. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1993.